The In-House Movement Fad

Enough With The In-House Movement Hype, Already

Just in the last year, here are a few things I have seen described as “in-house”:

A movement designed for a watch company which then bought the movement company as a turnkey movement manufacturing solution

A movement “exclusive to [REDACTED] designed entirely to our specifications”

A movement made by a movement manufacturer that used to have a completely different name, then got bought out by the acquisition arm of a major luxury conglomerate, had its old name taken off the door and a new name put up that was the name of the brand for which it now makes “in-house” movements

A movement made by a company that everyone generally thinks of as making all of its movements in-house for decades but that didn’t actually own the movement manufacturer until fairly recently in the history of both companies

A movement made exclusively for a company that owns a significant but not majority share position in the company that made the movement

... and the list goes on and on. This is just the tip of the iceberg, too — the problem is that we have a single, incredibly vague term being used to describe a ridiculously heterogeneous set of business and manufacturing practices, in one of the most incestuously interdependent businesses on the planet, which have in many cases almost nothing to do with each other except for the fact that everyone is saying they’re all “in-house.” Seldom have the words of Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride been more apt — “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

And yet despite that, there is a reason brands keep using the word — it’s because they think it means something to consumers. We keep hearing it because watch brands think it’s what we want to hear. But the term has become so debased at this point that my first reaction when I read a press release that describes a movement as “in-house” isn’t excitement — it’s skeptical suspicion, the horological equivalent of a sign on a used car saying “Only One Careful Owner!” And it’s not because I think the brand’s trying to lie outright — the problem is that its meaning to the industry and its meaning to consumers have diverged so badly as to make the term useful only as a means of making people wonder what the hell someone means when they’re using it.

Look, making movements is expensive. If you’re going to make a few thousand automatic movements a year and you really want them to be entirely to your own design, it costs millions — CNC machines, optical comparators, automatic oilers, automated poising and timing machines, people to program everything, someone to set up an inventory system, a quality control department, and on and on — and if you want to make the whole damned watch in-house, you’d better have either Rolex-level money or Roger Smith-level skill and patience (and prices).